EviQE: Evidence Selection for LLM-Based Query Expansion

Abstract

LLM-based query expansion increasingly conditions reformulation on documents retrieved from the target corpus, yet most work focuses on how to generate expansions rather than which documents the model should read. We propose EviQE, which aggregates documents retrieved by multiple reformulators, selects a compact evidence set, and uses it for one grounded expansion step. This separates evidence selection from generation and treats reformulators as complementary retrieval perspectives. Across three TREC DL and five BEIR benchmarks, reformulators frequently retrieve distinct relevant documents, so pooled candidates provide higher relevant-document coverage than any individual source. The strongest gains come from relevance-based evidence selection: LLM-Score consistently outperforms direct reformulation, cold-start expansion, and single-source seeded expansion. Additional retrieval-generation rounds provide little benefit once strong conditioning evidence has been selected and can reduce effectiveness.